One mom let her 12-year-old son create a MySpace.com account under the condition that she be allowed to monitor it.

She was shocked when just a few hours later, her son received a message from a school friend asking him to indicate whether he drank, smoked, took drugs or had engaged in a number of sexual activities.

A father was appalled when he learned his 12-year-old daughter had created a MySpace group that identified her and her friends as "sluts."

Both parents forced their children to cancel their accounts and brought their concerns to the respective school administrators.

While these are not new concerns, the rising popularity of MySpace creates a new problem: It inspires users to rack up online "friends," and many teens add strangers to the list of people allowed to view their personal information.

"It's kind of scary to find as we are doing more and more of these presentations (at schools) that 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds are chatting with people online and actually meeting them," said Deputy Attorney General Kristin Izumi-Nitao, a member of the Hawai'i Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

Schools are well aware of the problem with MySpace and other Web sites — the Department of Education has been blocking students from mature material, noneducational blog sites, instant messaging programs, chatrooms and peer-to-peer file sharing programs for about a decade. But since schools have no control over what students do off-campus, the problem persists.

"Obviously, we cannot do anything about it if they do it from home," said DOE telecom director K. Kim.

With the popularity of such sites as MySpace.com and Xanga .com, parents and school officials are growing increasingly concerned as they discover what children are doing online.

While MySpace restricts membership to those 14 and older, younger kids seem to have no problem getting accounts by lying about their age.

Many children use the sites for valid and benign reasons, but parents have reason to worry that their children may be exposed to inappropriate material or post personal information and photos that will make them susceptible to Internet predators.

Harassment and bullying have become issues, too. School officials have discovered that some students are posting insulting comments and pictures of people they don't like.

Although students may think they stay safely anonymous by creating fake profiles — "Kids think they're invincible," Izumi-Nitao said — there are ways to track down posters. Information on their Web sites and elsewhere can allow predators to pinpoint their home addresses, schools and other information.

Since 2002, the Hawai'i Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force has prosecuted 14 men who tried to meet and presumably have sex with police officers posing online as teenagers.

With the popularity of MySpace.com, where kids try to get people to like their pages and be their online "friends," the danger grows. "You know sexual predators are on MySpace as well," Izumi-Nitao said.

Betty White, principal at Sacred Hearts Academy, said she is concerned by what some of her students are posting on MySpace.

"The idea is good but it can easily be abused," she said. "They attack each other, they attack the groups; lots of the time they can bring dishonor to the schools they are members of."

Some students post pictures of themselves drinking, smoking or participating in sexual behavior that the school does not tolerate or condone, White said.

Sacred Hearts senior Cristina Cordero, 17, has seen inappropriate content on others' postings, but she takes pains to keep her own clean, and accepts as "friends" only people she knows well. "Anyone can see mine because there's nothing on it that I'm ashamed of," she said. "I don't put anything negative about anybody, because everyone sees it and it's just asking for trouble."

Cordero also keeps the photos she posts wholesome, although she has seen other people's postings that aren't. "Girls put up pictures of themselves when they're not decently dressed," she pointed out.

She understands why schools should be concerned about students using MySpace at school, but she doesn't see an issue with students using it from home. "I never saw it as something bad," she said. "For me, it's just a way that I can post pictures. ... I see it as something fun."

The problem is one that concerns private school administrators nationally, White learned recently at a conference.

Sacred Hearts is helping teach girls at the school to know what is appropriate and inappropriate to post online.

"There's a lot of good stuff, but there's also a lot of very foul language and defaming each other's character," White said. "We're trying to stop and see exactly what draws them to this mode of communication."

Nationally, White said, private schools are giving their students time to clean up their Web sites, then they're contacting parents.

Even when students keep their Web sites anonymous, parents and school administrators are discovering it is not difficult to find out who put them up.

After Andrea Hamilton, Sacred Hearts' director of special programs, learned of MySpace, she did a search of students.

"It was just a quick one, but it was enough to make me drop my jaws and make me want to make a hole and crawl in it," she said.

Reach Treena Shapiro at tshapiro@honoluluadvertiser.com.